Reddit had/has a plan to block mobile browsers in favor of their app

What the F Reddit, are you trying to speedrun the worst decisions a website can do??

They are trying what Facebook did to their Facebook chat, forcing users to use the app by banning mobile web access
- And I'm curious how many facebook users have the chat app. (and how many just walked away)
- I stopped using Facebook altogether because of that.
  Reddit follows the enshittification.
- iirc you can still use Facebook messenger with the m.facebook com at the mobile browser to chat

They can serve you ads just fine on mobile web, that’s not it. It’s that the app let’s them track your behavior far better than the web browser.

They can serve you ads just fine on mobile web, that’s not it. It’s that the app let’s them track your behavior far better than the web browser.
It's both. Firefox for Android lets you run uBlockOrigin, effectively killing the ads.
You know what's most fucked up about all of these types of practices? It's that they had something great and have deliberately slowly destroyed it because of unchecked greed. Same with Facebook. They had a site so great that like 60% of the people on the entire planet signed up. They've been making money. Reddit and Facebook make millions of dollars a month. But it's not enough for them. Nooo. They have to make billions. They have to make enough money to buy governments and amass as much power as small nations. The men running these companies are soulless. They try to fill the hole in their hearts with money, but it will never be enough. They've taken something that was amazing, something that benefitted billions of people, and destroyed it to serve their own selfish greed.
- I run a DNS based ad and tracking blocker on my home network (similar to Pihole) through my router, and it's amazing what apps are totally incapable of running with those restrictions in place. Amazon's app doesn't work, neither does Wells Fargo. Apps that do this are absolutely predatory and need to be regulated. They harvest my data in shady, insecure, annoying, obtrusive ways, and if they or their customer's mishandle it, I have essentially no recourse, except for maybe a $0.32 payout as part of a class action lawsuit.
  Would I have given my data to Cambridge Analytica? No. Did Facebook? Yes. Was it mishandled? Totally. What recompense will I get from it? Nothing! Will it happen again? Absolutely.
Chinese owners need a tiktok backup plan.

Hey Reddit, There's a reason why there were a dozen alternatives to your official Reddit app.

Some of them predate the official app.
I can’t think of any other website that has that many alternative apps, much less at that popularity level
- Twitter did, at one point
- I don't think there are any other for profit sites that would allow third-party apps. They data is currency to them.

Why would the owners of a website want to make it harder to browse their website

My guess is this is only for mobile users which would explain why when the OP request a desk top version of the site he can still log in. That way they can push more mobile users to the app and shove all sorts of ads down their throat and there's nothing they can do about it. You can block ads on a browser, you can't in the official Reddit app.
Shut down all the 3P apps. Prevent mobile users from being able to use their browser on mobile, forcing them to grab the official app. Load it to high hell with ads... Profit.
- You can not block in the official app "yet" Wouldnt surprise me if we get some form of Revanced reddit app at some point. Same thing which youtube vanced. For me killing off the infinity for reddit app is my call to not use reddit on mobile anymore but a full switch to lemmy instead.
- My guess is this is only for mobile users
  You don't have to guess. That's exactly what they said in the screenshot
  The logged-in mobile web experience is currently unavailable ...
To force people to use their app, of course. Facebook did that several years ago with Messenger. There’s no real reason to not have mobile browser access to it other than to try to make people use the app so it can spy on you in various ways.
- Several years: like going on 15 years ago.
  Fuck we're old.
To sell ads

I honestly hope reddit keeps fucking up like this. It takes a lot of work and a long time to drive millions of casual users away from your site.

And from what I e been picking up it appears that reddit killing themselves is making for pretty good marketing for Lemmy and other reddit alternatives it kinda feels like a new era of the internet

They can get fucked then. I'm tired of this closed internet, walled garden attitude from large social media companies. They've taken the tools that people built to make information free and available, and have locked them down for their own selfish purposes. I will not give them any more of my time.

Right like how you can't copy images from Pinterest, a site that populates all your Google Image searches. Like you fuckers didn't create this content. You just got people to upload it to your site then blocked anyone else from accessing it without a membership and a share link.
- I added a browser plugin on Firefox that blocks all Pinterest results from Google and DDG. Half the time they want you to log in just to see the page. Google is lame for including them in results.
- I fucking hate Pinterest. I don't understand why anyone uses it.
- Pinterest has long been a member of my uBlocklist configuration.

I miss-cropped, OP for context:

This content is better in the app! Log in to Twitter/TikTok/Reddit to view it!

Since Reddit removed the option to "stop asking to open in app" in mobile browseds it was clear this would be the next step.

Spoofing user agents go brrrrrr

Seriously, the data mining is going to put so much load on their servers, this is whole thing screams "management considered the technology teams assessment, but decided to go forward with [dumb project codename for fucking the platform over]"

Project Forgeddit

I'm utterly shocked and appalled. /s

CEOs will happily restrict your freedoms for just a bit of profit, and destroy any competitors who threaten their monopoly. I don't get how anyone can defend this system in good faith.

Can't eliminate the "I'll just do without" competition.
Like, when I got rid of Netflix... I didn't sign up for an additional new service. I just watch YouTube.
When I stopped using Facebook so much, I didn't go to another service -- I just didn't use social media as much.
People need to realize that using services like Reddit isn't a freedom, it is a privilege. Their servers, their rules.
People need to not accept services with a single point of failure, like a company. Time and time again, we have seen failure or degradation of services by companies. Ex. Twitter, Reddit, Yahoo. Twitch and Discord are heading the same way too.
People if people want to be free from these antics, we need to teach companies we won't accept data silos. We want and NEED decentralized federated services.

They don't know that the primary use case for reddit on mobile is getting good answers from Google.

Can't wait for Google to derank Reddit links due to this BS.

With how awful the interface is and how it spams me with DOWNLOAD THE APP TO SEE MORE, it kinda already "blocks" it for me. Browsing via Libreddit on mobile is so much better.

Not only that but some features like Chat just redirect you to the app on Reddit mobile web, and it's too cumbersome to use the desktop Reddit chat on a mobile browser.
- I had no idea people actually used that feature.

old.reddit will prolly be next

'But they pinky promised that they wouldn't!' -Reddit users after the 30th, probably

lmao, they can't be serious

They know that many users will try to use web page once 3rd party apps stop working. They are testing how many of them they can make use their mobile app which allows them to obtain more information about you.

Not surprising, since ad blockers are a thing even on mobile these days.

Revanced app apparently also can patch reddit app and block ads. The thing though is that it will still collect information about you.
- That's nice, but I doubt enough people would use it to have a significant effect on Reddit's bottom line. It does require you to download APKs, patch them and install manually, which sounds easy to tech savvy people but isn't for the common grandma. Furthermore it's a bit bothersome cause you have to repeat it every time there's a new version (at least a new version that you want or that's required for continued access) and then there are all of those with iCrap, who can't patch apps at all.

And this is where I stop using Reddit altogether. I don't want to use any app, let alone the piss poor official app. I can barely read the site in desktop on my phone. And I only access it from my phone. So there's no reason left to go there. Taking away the compact site was bad enough, taking away the entire mobile site is the last straw...

But we need to track all your mouse movements, browsing history, eye gaze, hand shake, geolocation data, shopping habbits, political opinions, friends and family connections, to make it a better experience for you honest!

Doesn't surprise me a bit, before you know it they'll block the site completely when they detect an adblocker. (I already found an app that refuses to start when you block ads, so the techniques are out there)

I genuinely don't get it. I fully understand pushing users towards the app. But there is going to be a portion of users who will never install your app. So at some point, you are just pissing off those users by making your product worse and worse, and they're never going to install the app anyway. I'd rather the utterly atrocious experience of browsing the laggy desktop site on my phone.

I guess they think the dwell and other telemetry info from the app will be of greater value than the ads shown on a browser.

Companies that do this absolutely annoy me. Even Facebook doesn’t do this??

Yeah, so, uh, m.facebook.com has made a sudden and radical change in the last few days. I'm not sure what's going on, but it's currently not usable for me. I don't know if that's happening to multiple people.
Are there third party Facebook apps?
- I use Friendly social Browser on Android. It's basically a wrapper for the mobile website and allows me to sort posts the way I want them, which is important to me. I don't want the algorithm. I've used it for years. It works with quite a few different social media sites and doesn't allow all the tracking. I have the Plus version and I'm allowed to turn off ads on both the app and Facebook and block "stories" and other silliness I don't care for. I don't know if the free version does all of that.

If you want your app used so much, just make it snappy damn

This is what's amazing. They could make a good, ad-supported app, but they seem to insist they don't need to while wondering why everyone's angry about third party apps going away.
- Reddit never needed to fix their own hilariously-bad failure of an app, they could have just bought any of the ready-made, popular, beloved third-party apps out there for far less than this fiasco is costing them now. Old Twitter did this back in the day, some of their official clients started out as successful third-party apps.
  Spez is out there being an insane libelous asshole to Christian Selig when he could have just hired him.
How can they do all the data collection then?

Reddit making dumb decisions?! Impossible.

That's unpossible!

This is the Reddit. com front page on a mobile browser and has been for well over a year now

The writing has been on the wall for along time.

btw clear you cookies on exit, use a password manager, stay safe.

Too much salespeople see complaints like "your application is bad" and answer with "we're going to force it on you even more then".

The data they’re looking at when they make this decision is”people aren’t using our app as much as I’d like”.

Reddit is on that "Kill your own platform" speedrun any%

Makes no difference to me.

I stopped using Reddit and I’m glad that I don’t have to worry about this kind of user hostile changes.

Oh my, that is such a great idea, right on par with everything else they've been doing.

They've been planning this for a long time. I noticed a while ago that the "stop asking me about the app" preference went away, which was about the time I stopped going to reddit on mobile. My account is deleted now so I hope they got some good results to ignore and do what they wanted anyway.

Worst dark pattern ever.

Even now anytime you access Reddit mobile website and see an NSFW post, it would prompt you to install the app without an option to cancel. Literally the only way to continue without switching to the app was by using old.reddit.com

This will assist me further in avoiding using Reddit on my phone.

This happened on my device and I just said fuck it back to Lemmy.

Reddit's fucked

I have been using the iOS browser extension called ‘sink it’.. blocks promoted posts, kills the popup to use the app

It already did since 2 years ago, random "unverified content" bullshit login walls on popular/valuable advice, tens of megabytes of Javascript that took long to load on intermittent/unstable connections and terrible UI in general.

Don't forget killing of .compact
I wrote .compact to run on a Motorola Droid, which was a 533MHz device with 512Mb of total ram, and a kernel which was very aggressive about freeing up this ram.
- My respects to you. I really think websites and software in general need to have efficiency in mind again. Webapps should use as few resources as possible, save people's time, their money and the planet.

They have been doing a form of this for a long time. On the mobile browser, I can find individual posts, but if I try to click on the comments or anything, it just redirects me to the appstore to download the official garbage.

Honest question: why push people to use the app specifically? What is the advantage to reddit if everyone just magically dropped the browser and switched to the app?

all the better to spy on you, my dear.
Harder to block ads and tracking on an app.
Also, last time I tried it, you couldn't use the app without being logged in, so they get more data on you than if you were able to browse anonymously.
Reddit users are product not customers.
The product is the data they mine from users. The reddit app is almost certainly loaded with telemetry and tracking.
This is data that can be sold. Likely worth more than the increased ad revenue from users who know how to block ads on their phone.
- Its always worth to look at the amount of Data used between the official app and third party. Before unsinstalling i realised that sync for reddit had about 2 thirds the amount of tzraffic that the offical app uses...
For that sweet sweet ad revenue from my understanding
Since... It's significantly more difficult to avoid ads/data harvesting from an in-house-designed app than, say, a 3rd party browser with adblockers, or 3rd party apps that don't run ads at all

More nails to the coffin

They've been making their mobile site hard to use and blocking most utility with a "you really need our fucking app" popup for years now. I can't imagine how they could make it worse.

I only use reddit in 2 places. At work, where I am looking for an answer to something, I am not logged in and blocking ads. And the other is at home when I am winding down for the night. I use third party apps because the first party app sucks. I will just stop scrolling at home where I am logged in and they are gathering my data. And I will avoid reddit for answers when I am at work in favor of other forums.

They have been doing this for a long time now.

My solution was to use libreddit as a proxy, but at this point I would just advocate for ditching Reddit altogether.

I tried reddit with revanced, but even without ads the app is still garbage. Scrolling is laggy, simple gestures are non existent, I can't even copy a text by pressing on it.

They are doingeverything exactly how elon did on Twitter

Such genius and innovation. He added not one, but three pop-ups telling you to log in and allow notifications. Have you ever seen such naked brilliance before? No one besides him has had the courage... except for maybe every malware site webmaster in 2002. He also sold a blue checkmark for $8! Like how does one human have such an unlimited well of brilliance?
That makes me wonder, has anyone seen Spez and Elon in the same room? Are we sure they aren't the same person? Stelon Muskman?
- Stealon Muskman is such an appropriate name for such a demonic entity.

good thing I have a plan to block reddit :-)

that would be a final nail in their coffin

They've been doing this on Android for years already. I used sync. If I googled something and clicked on reddit, it would initially open in browser, then I'd get a pop up saying I needed to open the official app to continue reading on mobile.

This happened to me for years

Of course they do, in absence of the 3rd party apps that is how I would still be able to browse without ads on my phone. (If I didn‘t already switch fully to kbin and Lemmy)

I also expect one of these annoying "Disable your adblocker" pop ups for Desktop users.

This post is from early May, so probably long before they decided to kill the API (and the actual experiment could have started long before that post).

I deleted my app a few days ago and now I exclusively use reddit for r/Godot because sadly there just isn't an established community for godot elsewhere.

It makes sense that you'd be waiting for r/Godot
That is not a good reason to keep using reddit. A boycott is a boycott. If a community that you want is not available outside of reddit, why not start it here?
I also am hoping for more Gamedev groups. r/gamedev is shut down so my only hope is a community growing fast on here. the discords are... ok but not what I'm looking for. And I'm off reddit now so nothing on there will work for me.
R/godot is also one of my missing communities en Lemmy.
I hope that, with time, we can move people over here.
I assume as Reddit becomes more and more hostile and Lemmy more and more mature things will be easier.

Reddit can truly get fucked. Can't wait to delete all my Reddit accounts on July 1st. I'm holding out 1/100000th hope that they will come to their senses on June 30th.

Reddit has done a great job un-aliving itself.

in aliving
Please don't bring these TikTokisms to the fediverse

The official Reddit app doesn't work on older phones, guess I'm out of luck. I can afford a new phone, but I don't feel it's worth it to buy a new phone just for one app.

It's garbage anyway, so you're better off.

It's going from bad to worse on a daily basis.

Link to the full discussion.

Eww I clicked on a Reddit link, warning please!

I have been using the iOS browser extension called ‘sink it’.. blocks promoted posts, kills the popup to use the app

Getting rid of .compact was the first step.

How horrible. I refuse to install apps at all if I can avoid it. I much prefer having a back button, bookmarks, being able to save images, control location access and all that. I already barely use reddit now but this would ensure that I never do.

This is a new low, even in light of everything they've done recently

That app is POISON. On my poor low storage phone it quickly ballooned up to 1.3 gigabytes as it cached things. That itself would have outright driven me away from Reddit.

For anyone wondering, you can still use it on mobile by changing the address to old.reddit.com in your mobile browser. So its still accessible on all mobile devices, just not on www.reddit.com.

They said they are going to kill .old soon
- Have they actually said it? I've always assumed .old wouldn't be around forever. I'm sort of surprised it's lasted as long as it has.
- That would be like a sumo wrestler climbing on top of the current dumpster fire and taking a giant dump on it to add to the mess.
  If they do kill off old.reddit then I think it's toast.

@orientalsniper

If Reddit wants to kill itself, who am I to change its mind? (I already tried and they didn't accept my feedback because the form was rigged against being completed)

I have a feeling its too big to die to be honest
- MySpace isn't dead yet!
- It definitely can. Just because the website still exists doesn't mean it's still "alive". Facebook is still around and there's nothing actually relevant on it or about it.
- Virtually all of reddit's content is produced by a very small fraction of the userbase.
  I suspect there's a fairly large overlap between people who are fed up with reddit's bullshit, and people who actually post and create content, not just scroll.
  Reddit is cutting off that content supply to get more of the scrollers.

This is old news.

Now they're conducting experiments on us without our consent? Is there no low they won't stoop to?

Testing limited roll outs is actually really really common in large internet sites/apps. Done right, you'd never know.
It's a common thing to do, to test how it impacts the user experience without totally changing it for everybody. The problem here is that out right just removing access to the website via a mobile browser is so painstakingly obvious and imprecise, that it baffles me why they'd even do it.

Well, I guess that solves the problem of me browsing reddit on the toilet then. Just making it easier to stop using it.

The toilet?
- It's where most people go to poop.

It's designed to shove ads and bot posts in your face and steal your information, everything else is secondary. This is the true reason why the app is so fucking shitty and unusable for what reddit is supposed to be for.